Linking Strategies: The Top 10 Link Love Directories

Search engines love links. In 1998, when Larry and Sergey founded Google, they not only wanted to create a new-new search engine, but a highly relevant, reliable and trusted one. But how?

Altavista Search was all the rage at the time, but the young founders decided that a key metric for their search engine would be based on something new: a core algorithm using links as a measurement of relevancy and ranking among the key formulas. The basis for their emergent PageRank system was that a link to a certain page would yield a particular vote or value from a web page to that linked-to page.

There were, and still are several additional factors that include this value-type system, including anchor text, matching of theme/topic from that incoming link, and semantic attributes of the on-page text surrounding the link, and checks for spammy-looking links, or paid links (a heated topic).

Having said that, you can easily rank for the long tail keywordsby making sure that you have TITLE, DESCRIPTION and body text that matches your keywords (1-2) to that page. I ranked my own site, SEO Videos Secrets to the top of Google in 2 days using “seo video secrets” in a link from an external site, no search engine submission (a big no-no!). Long tail keywords are typically not highly searched terms (my example has none), but as an aggregate, can bring relevant (converting) traffic to your site. Try a free tool like http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ to make sure they have search counts, and to find these obscure, but strategic search terms across multiple engines. Then, watch your analytics and make sure they convert.

If you are trying to elevate your listings, build traffic and create a trust network for yourself (you should be!), you can do a lot with your SEO by using linking strategies in combination with the above, creating a better competitive edge for yourself, and a sustaining search engine presence.

Some past examples of highly first page ranked pages *without* content that matches link text are “click here” (adobe acrobat: to download ‘click here’), “miserable failure” (the whitehouse google bomb) and “robot” (the irobot movie with Will Smith, which only had Flash as content).

Your link strategy for relevancy, ranking and traffic should include adding links from the Top Directories, not just partner sites or social networks. You must apply the link from within related categories, as well as ensuring a “clean link”, something like this: ‘<a href=”http://www.your-website.com/” mce_href=”http://www.your-website.com/”>Your Preferred Keyword Here</a>’.

You should also verify that the directory is being indexed by Google. You can do this by the site: command – example – site: http://www.botw.org. (Check the cached data for the latest update, should be very current!)